Amplifying Relationships through Place and Locality in the Design of Local Government Digital Services

This paper presents an action research service design project that took place as part of the Public Collaboration Lab (PCL), a one-year, AHRC funded research project between Camden Council and Central Saint Martins (CSM), University of the Arts London. The project focused on the Council’s Home Library Service (HLS). With UK central government reducing budgets for local authorities, and increasing pressure from societal challenges including an ageing population, the HLS offered a speculative design space to reconfigure possible co-designed service futures. Visual ethnographic processes, framed within anthropological concepts of locality and place, traced the routes travelled and the interactions that were enacted between the HLS team members and its housebound readers, revealing the hidden nature of the relationships and knowledge that existed across the borough. I conclude that as governments look to reconfigure services—and often do so using abstract policy language—new frames of understanding of locality and place must be explored to deliver digital solutions that amplify the social and cultural dimensions that constitute a community. Keywords: Service design, Design anthropology, Digital anthropology, Local government services, Social innovatio